Who called William Shakespeare an ‘upstart crow’? A new study points to his co-author, Thomas Nashe

London, September 1592. Robert Greene, a popular writer of romances, plays, and pamphlets – with an apparent predilection for pickled herring and Rhenish wine in prodigal excess – has died.

Three pamphlets are published soon afterwards, each purporting to be Greene’s autobiographical deathbed repentance. The first to appear, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, contains a letter addressed to “those gentlemen … that spend their wits in making plays”. They were most likely George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nashe, three fellow playwrights who, like Greene, could boast a university education – and who are entreated to find “more profitable courses” for their wits.

After first rehashing (or parodying?) common Puritanical attitudes towards the theatres (idolatrous places where male actors dressed as women and audiences were not only distracted from their prayers but also frequently pickpocketed), our author then changes his focus.

He warns his fellow “university wits” against “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country”.

This sentence appears to be the first reference to Shakespeare’s writing for the stage. That’s...

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